Winds blew hot and cool last week, which is to be expected by mid-September; fall arrives next
Sunday.

The growing season peters out in September, and the first killing frost typically arrives in
October.

Before supermarkets, refrigeration and foodstuffs from halfway around the world, winter demanded
preparation.

Something in hunters, fishermen and trappers, no matter how urbanized or suburbanized, seems to
know that fall is urging them to stock up. Hunters feel a push to take to woods, fields and
wetlands so they may join nature in a struggle that must include living and dying, eating and being
eaten in order for life to continue. Fishermen take to water to do the same.

Capt. Bob, who with his wife, Michele, was hosting his 25th annual perch and walleye fry last
Sunday, said the yellow perch fishing two days before the gala was the best he’d seen in his
50-something years.

“We got a limit in an hour and 15 minutes,” he told two other anglers, one of whom had been
invited along and therefore was inwardly kicking himself for missing out. “A lot of them were
jumbos, a lot of 9- and 10-inch fish.”

The trick, Capt. Bob said, was finding the school of bigger perch. That required going about 8
miles off Lorain, to a location solidly on the sandbar that stretches northwest over clay bottom
until it emerges at the shallow end of Lake Erie to form Point Pelee in Canada.

Thus had Capt. Bob and Rick, his Buddha-shaped steelworker pal, put 60 perch “in the box” —
their cooler. It’s just another place where fish go to die aside from the innards of other fish or
foraging birds, in this case on the way to being transformed into tasty human meals.

Bob and guests gobbled schools of batter-dipped, deep-fried perch and walleye fillets, the
remains of the captain’s catching and cleaning since spring. The captain will be eating off his
2013 catch — much of it frozen and stored, much of it shared with friends and neighbors — until
well into 2014.

Many, if not most, of the diners seemed to take immense pleasure in eating Bob’s fish, though
where the fish came from seemed largely a matter of indifference. Few, if any, ascribed any meaning
to the fish’s catching and killing, and no one, save for Bob, attached a memory.

Even the captain, though he can readily recount taking a particularly large fish or enjoying a
distinctively good day on the lake 20 years ago, could no longer distinguish one breaded fillet
from another as it turned brown in hot oil and vanished a mouthful at a time.

Nobody at the fry who wasn’t fat already was getting fatter on fish and potatoes. Nor did anyone
seem concerned about possible lean months ahead, as some of their ancestors might have done while
reveling in an almost-autumn feast day.